10gen and Red Hat yesterday announced a major expansion of their previous relationship. The two companies are now going to make it much easier to use 10gen's MongoDB on Red Had operating systems and middleware solutions. Red Hat's Red Hat Enterprise Linux enterprise operating system, Red Hat’s Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware Solutions will all work with Mongodb.

This should be great news for developers developing big data solutions in the cloud. It could spell bad news for some of 10gen's NoSQL competitors. While the agreement is not exclusive, it certainly sets 10gen up as the preferred NoSQL solution for Red Hat, which recently became the first billion dollar open source company.

The companies had previously announced a relationship where 10gen would support Red Hat's PaaS offering OpenShift, but this goes far beyond that. From 10gen's blog on the relationship:

Over the next several months, we’ll be working closely with Red Hat to optimize and integrate MongoDB with a number of Red Hat products. You can look at this effort resulting in a set of reference designs, solutions, packages and documentation for deploying high-performance, scalable and secure applications with MongoDB and Red Hat software. Our first collaboration is around a blueprint for deploying MongoDB on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, which we will release shortly. We’ll follow that up with a number of additional projects around RHEL, JBoss, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV), Cloud Forms, Red Hat Storage (GlusterFS), and of course continue the work we have started with OpenShift. We hope to get much involvement from the Red Hat and MongoDB communities, and any enhancements to MongoDB resulting from this work will, of course, be open sourced.

Red Hat had this to say in the announcement:

“Web and enterprise developers need solutions that allow them to rapidly deploy applications that deal with large amounts of data in flexible public or private cloud environments,” said Scott Crenshaw, vice president and general manager, Cloud Business Unit at Red Hat. “Combining Red Hat’s technology stack with 10gen’s MongoDB NoSQL database will help developers to deliver on the promise of big data and cloud technologies.”

I had a chance to speak with Erik Frieberg, VP Marketing and Alliances at 10gen about the relationship. Erik said the whole company if very pumped about the Red Hat realtionship. At a time when the players in the NoSQL space are fighting to establish their identity, 10gen and Mongodb are becoming leaders in the space. Partnering with a blue chip like Red Hat certainly enhances this leadership identity.

I have spoken and written about 10gen many times before. The company is growing like mad right now having recently raised another round of financing. While some are saying the bloom is off the rose of the NoSQL movement, 10gen seems to be full speed ahead!

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